The only way I was able to change the memory ratio (this board with E6300, 2GB Mushkin low-latency DDR400 and an AGP ATI 1650pro) was to play around with the manual setting for RAM and FSB - the board seems to select the multiplier on it's own. If anyone knows how to adjust it manually, I'd love to know about it myself! Reply

..have had some 2-3-2-6-1 kingston memory for 2 years now (KHX3200AK2_1G)
used to be on a ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe. only did 2.5-3-3-12-1
now with the asrockdual-vsta i can't keep it stable unless i run at ~3-3-3-12-2 (400mhz)

why can't I even come close to the speeds shown in this article :( Reply

I have a possibly stupid question. Will this board work with only one stick of memory or do they need to be added in pairs. I have a single 1GB DDR400 stick in my Athlon XP3200 that would be nice to be able to use, but if I have to buy new memory anyway I might as well get the DDR2. Reply

The board works fine with a single stick of memory but you will be regulated to single channel operation. This places a 3%~7% performance penalty on most applications although you will need benchmarks to tell the difference in most cases. Reply

Perhaps it might be worthwhile to show performance numbers for the single-channel situation in one of the upcoming articles? I'm sure many people are in similar situations. My 754 machine just has a single 1Gb DDR400 stick as well, so if I were to consider a value Core 2 cpu & board combo (of the sort Fry's may offer in the coming months) I might want to continue using that memory if it will work and not completely cripple the performance.
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Is the asrock 775-HDTV rev2 (using the ati xpress200 chipset) one of the budget boards on the review list? It is limited to single channel but was contemplating this as a stopgap for a few months until rd600 & co arrive, when the board would become a cheap htpc. its also one of the only uATX conroe boards available.

All up, congrats on doing such a useful 'realistic' review early on in the piece - makes a nice change from all the super-expensive stuff that is not in the picture for 99% of people. Reply

Sounds good to me. I could go with that for a while and later upgrade to the DDR2 and new video card, and a better motherboard at some point after that. An e6600 should be available for around $350 (one of these days anyway), and then this board for under $75 or so. Roughly $400 to $425 for a significant upgrade and an easy path for other components sounds good to me.

Now after the most obvious subject line of all time, here's what I'm thinking:

I continue to be impressed with Conroe's performance, but grow more and more dissapointed with Conroe's performance scaled to price. With s939 basically any price paid could get you very near FX-57 speeds. Cheap DFI Infinity board + Cheap Opteron 144 or a lucky 3000+ = 2.6+ghz on air with a good cooler. An FX-57 might hit 3.0ghz on air if you were very lucky.

Conroe doesn't seem to work that way. Sure the top 2 or 3 processors perform the same, give or take, but the lower cache processors loose a lot of performance (much more than the above mentioed Athlons). Then, getting a cheaper motherboard really lowers maximum overclock. Then high-performance memory costs a lot more, and probably adds more performance as well. Finally really cheap parts like this totally cripple performance.

I think as more people come to relize this we will see a reality check from the community, where many on the high end will end up with awesome Conroe systems, but many others will realize with their budgets a nicely upgraded s939 X2 system with their existing servicable DDR memory and a newly discounted X1900XT will be a better overall platform dollar for dollar. This user is certainly beginning to lean that way. And heck, by the time I have to upgrade for a second time Conroe should be available with a 1066mhz FSB anyways. Reply

"The 4MB L2 cache can increase performance by as much as 10% in some situations. Such a performance improvement is definitely tangible, and as applications grow larger in their working data sets then the advantage of a larger cache will only become more visible. "

Also keep in mind a 3.5% average is much like claiming a new GPU is unnecessary because it only effect's your computing experience 10% of the time. If it's effects are highly pronoumced during those times it could still be worthwhile. The 4meg parts have a 10% inprovement in some apps and games, and that is a pretty big deal. Reply

The situation is in fact the opposite of a GPU. The GPU increases your performance during the "10% of the time" when it counts, during games. The extra cache on the Conroe seems to increase performance when it doesn't count.

For the record, I agree with you about AMD carrying the better budget offerings at present. Intel has only the ASrock board to offer the budget gamer, which comes with some big sacrafices (lack of overclocking, 4XPCI-E). However, I am buying this board so that I can afford a better core 2 processor (6400 or 6600), which I will put in a better budget motherboard in a few months. I figure I'm basically "renting" this motherboard for 6 months or so. So I think going with budget conroe offers a much better upgrade path. Once we have cheap boards that can overclock the 6300/6400 30-40% (which should happen in only a month or two) your argument will be obselete because the overclocked Allendales absolutely crush the X2 chips. Reply

"Once we have cheap boards that can overclock the 6300/6400 30-40% (which should happen in only a month or two) your argument will be obselete because the overclocked Allendales absolutely crush the X2 chips."

That's true, and I look forward to it. I just think AMD has spoiled me with the idea that there is very little reason to spend extra $$$ so long as I'm willing to work a bit and accept some risk. If Intel prices move a bit to make the same situation true, I will be happily enjoying my fast Conroe machine. Reply

I don't normally join the ranks of the review bashers (who of course mostly come out of the woodwork when Intel is reviewed favorably against AMD), but this review seems to have a fatal flaw.

The stated purpose is to show what you do or don't gain by trading in your DDR memory when moving to a Core 2 Duo platform. The review compares DDR to DDR2 performance on the same platform, which at first glance seems reasonable. However, in the prior review of another mainboard based on the same PT880Pro chipset (the review linked at the bottom of page 3), your conclusion about that board states:

quote:However, the performance of the board was dismal at best in our benchmarks compared to the more recent Intel and NVIDIA chipsets.

The charts in that review show that BOTH DDR and DDR2 performance was equally dismal.

Since the primary reason for purchasing this board is for DDR support, presumably no one who wants to upgrade to DDR2 would bother with it. Therefore any performance comparison of DDR to DDR2 on this board is pointless for the stated purpose of the article. It artificially cripples DDR2 performance, making DDR look quite good and even superior.

For a proper comparison, you need a reasonably priced competitor that doesn't suffer such low DDR2 performance; perhaps a P965Express board, or even a 945 board if any of those have Conroe support.
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quote:The stated purpose is to show what you do or don't gain by trading in your DDR memory when moving to a Core 2 Duo platform. The review compares DDR to DDR2 performance on the same platform, which at first glance seems reasonable. However, in the prior review of another mainboard based on the same PT880Pro chipset (the review linked at the bottom of page 3), your conclusion about that board states:

Our comments were based on the performance at the time of review with an early but shipping bios revision that as it turns out had some memory timing issues. The latest bios (1.5) has altered the performance of this board to some degree although DDR2-667 performance is not where it should be. In some cases the performance differences are less than 5% now when using optimized DDR2-533 settings. While this board does not have the overclocking capability of the P965 boards we have tested to date, it still performs within reason at stock speeds.

quote:For a proper comparison, you need a reasonably priced competitor that doesn't suffer such low DDR2 performance; perhaps a P965Express board, or even a 945 board if any of those have Conroe support.

You are correct. However, we did state (first page) that a full comparsion would be provided in our final article. While I wanted to post a P965 result in this article we had not received our "budget" P965 boards from Foxconn, Epox, ECS, or MSI yet (two are here now, other two next week). I felt like a comparison to a 965 board that will be in the $100 price range would be better than showing results against a $150~$225 P965 board. Also, ASRock had just provided a new bios update (memory compatibility) for the 945P and 945PL boards that we are still testing as of today. It appears at first glance our original memory performance issues with these boards have been solved also. It appears now that the VIA memory performance at DDR2-533 is within 5% of our better performing P965 boards. We will have a full comparison up next week and hopefully we can figure out a way to get DDR2-667 working at CAS3 in a stable manner (it works but we still have not completed a full round of testing without a failure, BF2 and Q4 seem the most sensitive to lockup but SuperPI passes, LOL).

I appreciate your comments and look forward to your thoughts on the final article. Reply

quote:along with results from other ASRock value boards featuring the Intel i865 and 945P chipsets.

Yep, I didn't see that line. You have to admit though it's buried pretty deep in that paragraph. I still think THIS article would have been far more informative with 1 other value DDR2 comparison point. But the whole picture will be clear with the final article, so I'll just look forward to that.

On a side note, I'm quite interested in this series of articles, yet I have almost zero interest in actually buying any Core 2 products for myself or for customers. Aside from the occaisional high power 3D CAD box (for running ProE usually), I travel exclusively in the budget and low-midrange market. Intel hasn't had anything compelling for me there in years, and still doesn't. I guess Core 2 info is more interesting than AM2 info, even if I'm not going to buy it.
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In reviews here, I saw a tendency to use grand words for small feats. I won't consider the 10% this board is behind others "dismal performance" - so for very little money, you could get good performance - that is the thing every budget buyer wants. Reply

quote:In reviews here, I saw a tendency to use grand words for small feats. I won't consider the 10% this board is behind others "dismal performance" - so for very little money, you could get good performance - that is the thing every budget buyer wants.

That was overboard after reading through it again. ;-) Let's say in the future we use a different phrase. :) Reply

I looked at the charts in that review. 'Dismal' was the right word. It would be one thing if ALL value boards scored 10% lower than high-end boards; then it would be wrong to call such performance 'dismal'; that would be 'value' or some other word that respects the bargain price of the board. However, when many value boards come within a percentage or two of high-end boards (at least when considering stock performance), then 'dismal' is a great word for the perfomance that board exhibited.
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We've looked at this board with high-end components, and users expressed interest in knowing more. As stated in the article, this is part one of three where we look at some interesting budget options. We've now established that DDR-400 and DDR2-533 perform acceptably on this system, for a budget configuration. Next up is a look at how the AGP and PCIe options fare, followed by a final article with comparisons to other similar boards (including an 865 and 915 model - not sure about the 945 though). 945 will require DDR2, of course, so it's in a bit different category. Reply

I never asked for it, but I sure as heck was wanting this EXACT article! Thank you! I already have purchased a E6300 and this same ASrock motherboard and received both, except the corner is bady bent from shipment so I haven't dared try to power the mainboard up and am awaiting a NewEgg claim to run through. Grrrr.

The only thing this article didn't cover was my curiosity if the different types or RAM and the AGP vs PCIe graphics could possibly have any affect on the ~300FSB OC this board was able to attain in your previous article? Considering it OCs on the heels of any nForce chipset out there I think $57 is a exceptional value right now as I use a Northwood based system. My 9600XT won't handle games, but I'll at least get some serious folding@home work done... ;) Reply

I think the question for someone looking to upgrade on a budget isn't "will I efficiently use the new motherboard and CPU with my old peripherals," but "will I see a real performance increase by keeping all my old gear except the motherboard and CPU?"

You could be using the new board efficiently when compared to DDR2, but still not see enough difference to make upgrading worth the cost. Or, alternatively, your memory could be wildly inefficent in the new architecture compared to DDR2, but the new gear still brings you a huge performance increase. It all depends on the existing gear.

Right now, I have a Socket A TBred 2600+, 1GB of Mushkin DDR-333, and a Geforce 550 8x AGP card w/256MB, all on an Asus a7n8x deluxe 2.0 (I think). So in my world, the question is, if I have only $200-250 to spend to upgrade, is it better to get the cheap mobo and a cheap CPU, or invest in more memory, or what? It's quite possible that I won't see a real performance increase with the new board and CPU for that price, so it would be pointless to upgrade. In fact, it might even make sense to go buy an eMachines or something like it offered for $200-300, with some Celeron D processor in it, instead.

Of course, this is a lot harder to gauge, not least of which because it's a lot more subjective :) Reply

You should probably read through the rest of their Conroe articles then, especially the Feeding the Monster article where they have some hard numbers on this motherboard with a Core 2 Duo you were looking for. ;) Reply

thanks for this great article, i hope ASrock's efforts w/ PCI-E/agp and ddr/ddr2 solutions gets noticed by some of the big dogs cause im still using my ASrock Dualsata2 and intend on keeping it for my upgrade to dualcore and hang on to it for atleast another year. After that, looks like i'll keep my DDR memory and head on over to the Core duo camp. ASrock really knows how to squeeze the life outta all your components especially since most of these "upgrades" like DDR-DDR2 and AGP-PCI-E do NOT provide ANY performance improvements. just marketing BS so these companies can sell hardware.:( Reply

Moving from DDR to DDR2 allows you to buy cheaper components (a bit cheaper). As for AGP and PCI-E, top of the line cards are PCI-E, on AGP you can find only mainstream (maybe because PCI-E x16 gives more juice to the card than AGP can?)
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erm, moving to ddr2 isnt cheaper if i hafta ditch my 1gb of ddr ram.;) as for the PCI-E, im taking about bandwidth wise, PCI-E hasnt offered any performance increases at all. Sure, what's available now is only high end PCI-E, but if they did make a high end 7900GTX in AGP im sure it wouldnt perform 1 fps less than the PCI-E version. AGP8x was simply never saturated enough. Reply

What would be intresting would be a maybe running at least the synth benchmarks on another C2D mobo.. with the same CPU,HDD;DDR2 etc etc.

This would show us if the mobo as a whole runs at a performance handicap to others mobo or.. as I would hope.. basicly its up or near there in performance with most other C2D mobos with or without DDR2.

If that is the case then the mobo is truly very good for those of us not wanting to shell out 250e+ for 2x1Gb DDR2 when we already have 2x512Mb DDR sat in our current rigs so we could spend that money on CPU/GPU as you wrote in your atricle and maybe get DDR2 later as and when funds become available.
thanks. Reply

quote:What would be intresting would be a maybe running at least the synth benchmarks on another C2D mobo.. with the same CPU,HDD;DDR2 etc etc.

You will see this in the final comparison article. The general performance of the board is about the same as we reported in our Conroe Buying Guide. However, the 1.5 bios has improved performance in some areas. Reply

It appears with Conroe on a VIA chipset DDR2-533 gains more, but real-world is still in the ball park with DDR400. That may be a commentary on the VIA chipset and may not apply to Intel or nVidia or ATI. However, this VIA board is the first to allow a DDR/DDR2 comparison with Conroe.

There are other boards for Dore 2 Duo coming that will support DDR on Core 2 Duo. For the value builder, it will be interesting to see how this board compares to some of those. Reply

In some instances DDR was quite a bit faster than SDR. I think it gave about a 10% performance boost on average, and up to 20% in a few special cases. It's also worth noting that the ASRock does offer lower performance than other high-end DDR2 boards, but the price tradeoff makes it justifiable. Reply

DDR was quite a bit faster than DDR - just the way it is now with DDR2 and SDR. However, in the budget side of the equation, the processors weren't starved enough for bandwidth, so the difference was very small.
I wonder what the results would have been if a faster processor would have been used.

Oh, and maybe the chipset/BIOS isn't optimized for DDR2 performance (as for DDR, all the performance that could have been squeezed in about three-four years of building chipsets was already there). Reply

Yep, I feel stoopid :)
Anyway, the idea is that a change in memory patterns (SDR to DDR, SDR to RDRAM, DDR to DDR2) is a battle between old very optimised technology, and new, unproven yet technology. The small difference in speed can be explained that "current" technology in processors is built for best performance with current memory - a new memory type often is not optimised for the memory access needed by the processor.

As an example, RDRAM was (just a tad) slower on Pentium !!! (compared to high performance SDRAM). Pentium4, which was bandwidth starved with single channel SDRAM, was much faster with RDRAM (dual channel though) - as much as a P4 2000 (Willamette) with SDRAM was equal to a P4 1600 with RDRAM. As speed increased, needed bandwidth increased too - but the move to dual channel DDR was the final nail in the coffin of RDRAM on PC.
The other example - Athlon64 is not bandwidth starved on current (dual channel DDR400) memory, so doubling memory bandwidth brought no advantage. The decrease in latency was not enough to bring extra performance.
The situation is mostly similar with Core2Duo - more memory bandwidth brings little advantage.

This might change for quad-core processors, as they could use twice the memory bandwidth we see now - or on the Athlon side with a more aggressive prefetching algorithm (which will eat bandwidth bringing data that seem to be useful in the near future). Reply